New CIO's Job One: Fix federal contracting
Summary: DC's Guv 2.0 czar Vivek Kundra promises to bring federal government into the modern age, but he will have to confront the government's cumbersome contracting and purchasing procedures.
Absolutely brilliant choice: President Obama has named D.C. CTO Vivek Kundra as Chief Information Officer of the United States. I wrote about Kundra in January, based on a Washington Post article. Kundra has been aggressively been driving DC to adopt Web 2.0 technologies, pushing down costs and increasing government responsiveness.
Obama seems particularly interested in the “cutting costs” aspect, The Times’ Brian Knowlton noting that a six-line message from the White House referred twice to cost-cutting.
In a 25-minute conference call, Kundra set these sweet goals:
- extend use of cloud computing in the federal government
- put vast amounts of public information online through a data.gov website
- make government IT just as good as private sector IT
So two major themes here -- cutting costs and modernizing IT. They go together of course. But it’s not just the technology. When the topic turns to making government ops more efficient, the media quickly notes (I heard the News Hour bring this up in an interview with Janet Napolitano) that every president says there will be cost-savings through efficiency. Why does it never happen?
Simple answer: failure to reform government’s contracting and purchasing procedures, which have become sticky with red tape, unnecessarily slow and burdensome and corrupted with no-bid contracts. I’m no contracting expert and I realize government is burdened with legal requirements, but I know that large private sector organizations manage to move much more swiftly than government does.
It’s not as sexy as running a contest for open-source applications to improve government but Kundra will have to work with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to devise a new way for the government to do business. Without doing so, government IT will never match the private sector’s and more importantly we will continue to waste taxpayer money at a time when we can least afford to do so. If reform succeeds it will benefit government and taxpayers for decades to come.
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Talkback
Obamasiah's future for the peasants...
Re: Obamasiah's future for the peasants
Bush, Cheney and Rowe cannibalized America and your whining about Obama-he inherited this nightmare and Congress will modify his proposals. The system ain't perfect but still works. The Feds are needed to counter-balance the free for all the Repubics created.
ez4
You are an embarrassment
You're no better, and maybe even worse, than the looney left Bush
haters.
Thanks guys
Partisan politics as usual
Government Should Not Work Like Business
You hit the nail on the head
But until the FAR changes, what we have is what we have and the only way to speed this process up a little is to ensure there are enough, properly trained, contracting staff members.
PS: I'm not in contracting but have worked with contracting staff for years and see how overburdened many of them are.
RE: New CIO's Job One: Fix federal contracting
I wonder if this guy is a tax cheat too.
Government will never be as nimble as the private sector. When public monies are at stake there is always waste. Government also does not hold their people accountable like they do in the private sector. they can spend too much and just charge us higher taxes.
I hope they are mindfull of security with the Russians and Chinese engaging in cyber-warfare.
Holding people accountable
<b>pizzaman said:
"Government also does not hold their people accountable like they do in the private sector"</b>
you mean the way they held Dick Fuld and Bernie Madoff accountable?
Actually...
We have a government now that wants centralized power and that contradicts our constitution. Power corrupts absolutely. Lots of regulations coming down the pike. If I want a nanny I will hire one. Government regulations are ruining our economy and will further damage our healthcare system if we let them.
The government holds people accountable.
Having said that, I like most of three bullets:
1. extend use of cloud computing in the federal government
- Good. The first step is less about contracting and more about removing outdated security policies. Even if someone posts their email address on the public govt site, that email address is then considered PII. That means that whoever runs that Web site has to spend weeks of hours backing it up securely and then making sure only certain people have access to it...despite it being public anyway.
2. put vast amounts of public information online through a data.gov website
- This is sort of a good idea but I'm not totally sure of the purpose. The worst solution ever invented since 1999 has been, "let's make a web site for it." There are thousands of govt web sites. And places people go to first for data.
3. make government IT just as good as private sector IT
- That's a pretty vague, and self-depricating, goal.